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Wednesday, 22 March 2017

It's herrrrrrre! My brand new bright and shiny blog is all ready to go and you can find it here.Here's a sample of the first post:

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Ooo look! It’s my bright and shiny new blog! It’s here! Hooray!

I can’t tell you how excited I am to be blogging again, and I also can’t tell you how grateful I am for the all the support and encouragement I’ve already received. Thank you. Really. Thank you.

For my first official post, I thought I’d explain a bit about what you can expect to find here. As I said in my post here, this blog is going to be focused on issues to do with mental (un)health. The right sidebar has a list of the pages for each of the topics I will be talking about [though at this time they all say ::under construction:: Posts will be coming #soon]. And yes, if you are wondering, that title is an Ed Sheeran song lyric. I love him ok. Like not Mars level love, but it is way up there.

I always find that the days following good days are some of
the hardest. That probably sounds weird, like, shouldn’t you just be grateful that you had a few good days?
Shouldn’t that make things seem better? Unfortunately, no. In fact the inverse
is true. It’s like your brain is taunting you. Like, HEY! HEY YOU! Remember this? Remember being happy? Remember being
functional? It’s pretty damn great, right! YAY YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE TODAY! YOU
AREN’T WATCHING YOUR HEART RATE FALL AND HOPING IT STOPS! You’re cure--- Lolz,
no, I’m just playin’. You’re still incredibly screwed up and hey let’s play a
game called Remembering Every Bad Thing That Has Ever Happened In The History
Of Forever! Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Yeah. My brain is a bastard. Honestly I don’t know why
lobotomies are no longer a thing. Fun fact: I asked my doctor for a lobotomy
about three months ago. Deadpan.

He said, I’m pretty
sure I could pull one off if need be. Either that or make you a braindead
zombie. Or just dead.

I said, hey man. Any
one of those is fine with me.

Unfortunately he didn’t follow through with it. Something about
losing his medical licence, I don’t know.

Not only are these thoughts entirely unhelpful, they are
also entirely untrue.

Now, hear me out. I know that sounds a bit like everything-gets-better-you’ll-be fine-let’s-go-snort-glitter.
That is not what I am saying at all. What I amsaying is things change. They
do. They may feel like they won’t, but they do. The only constant is change. In
psychology** there’s a term called durability bias. Durability bias is the tendency for people to overestimate how long certain feelings and emotional states will last. It is the notion that I will feel
like this forever. And it is wrong. You won’t feel the exact same way
forever, good or bad, unless you happen to find a doctor who performs
lobotomies***.

Sometimes this is comforting. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes
change makes things worse. Harder. A worsening of symptoms. A decline in
health. A new difficulty or problem. Another reason to believe that things – that
you – will not and cannot get better. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes
change helps. It improves things. It brings a new challenge. A new perspective.
Inspiration. A new method of coping of surviving or swimming when all you want
to do is drown. No matter what, change happens, whether we want it to or not.
And while not all changes are good, it is comforting, for me at least, to know
that nothing lasts forever. That the only constant is change.

With this in mind, I have come to a decision. I am going to
be closing this blog and moving to a new one. A new chapter, if you will. The
new blog will be linked to this one -- which will still exist but won’t be
updated – and it will still be under the authorship of The Girl With Words
[that’s meeeeee]. The content will be along the same lines of the content on
this blog, but perhaps with more of an emphasis on mental health as that is my
focus and my passion**** [along with rambling into the wind, of course]. There
is a strong theme of mental health on this blog, I believe, but I plan to make
it more obvious on the new blog. I plan to use what I’ve learnt through my
years of dealing with the yuck things in life to hopefully help others going
through a similar thing, or to help those with loved ones going through a
similar thing to understand things better. There are certain things in life
that I believe are very difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced them
yourself or had someone close to you experience them. I hope that I can write
about those topics in a manner that makes them accessible. If not, feel free to
the release the hounds on me. Even the hounds with bees in their mouths.

I have been thinking about doing this for a while now. Not
because there is anything wrong with this blog – I love it and I love all of
you for reading it – but because I am not the person I was when I started it
way back in 2013. I am not who I was four years ago, both for better and for worse
in different ways. In the theme of change, since I started this blog, I:

…Ahem. Anyway. My point is, things change. People change. I
changed. Maybe not so much for the better, but I changed. And now it’s time for
my blog to change. To start again with a brand new name. I hope you will join
me as I embark on the next chapter of The Girl With Words. Going boldly where no
Girl With Words has gone before.

After all, every new beginning comes from some other
beginning’s end.

*Fun GWW fact: I am
petrified of bees. And wasps. And the wasps with bees in their mouths so when
they bark they shoot bees.

**Forgive me; I am
currently doing a psych degree and I am loving learning about this stuff and
throwing it around like I know what I’m talking about when I so clearly don’t. Ah
yes, the Rorschach test. Indeed. Freud. Yes.

***And if you do, hook
a girl up, K?

****I have always wanted
to be a school psychologist and work with children in need of help. I had a
place at a university to do the degree when I finished high school, but it was
in another state and my mother’s apron strings couldn’t stretch that far, lol.
I am kidding. You guys know that my mom is my most favourite human ever. She
didn’t want me to move away at that time so I didn’t.

TITLE LYRICS: ‘Closing
Time’ by Semisonic

Technical notes:

When it is ready, I will post the link to my bright and
shiny new blog here, on Twitter, and on Instagram. As I said before, this blog
will still be here along with all its content. I may occasionally link to it
from the new blog the way I currently link to old posts now. I have no timeline
on this, but I hope to be ready within the next week or two. No promises,
though. My brain is a fickle thing and I can never be sure when it will decide
to pack up and leave.

Monday, 6 March 2017

Well helllllloooo there, everyone. It’s been a super long time since my last “real” post. I feel a bit awkward and weird writing here in
this manner again because I have been absent for so long. Like, a REALLY long
time. Is anyone even still reading? It’s okay if you’re not. …Which you
wouldn’t know, of course, because you wouldn’t have read that. Whoops.

Clearly my [already lacking] literary skills have declined
during my absence. Sorry. Hopefully I will improve back to mediocre in no time!

So, I’m sure if you’re reading, you’re wondering where I
have been. Let’s just say I have been at the very bottom of The Dark and Twisty Place. Like, there’s the point where you think
The Dark and Twisty Place ends, then you discover another secret hidden
chamber down the bottom, and then inside there is a trap door, and after
falling and falling and falling for what feels like 4000 years you reach the
bottom only to find that it is full of SNAKES! AND BEARS! AND LIONS! AND
TIGERS! AND MORE BEARS! OH MY! and so you try to run but the SNAKES ARE EATING
YOU AND THE BEARS ARE EATING THE SNAKES AND THE LIONS ARE EATING THE BEARS AND
THE TIGERS ARE EATING THE LIONS AND SOON YOU WILL BE SIXTEEN LEVELS OF
DIGESTED, HELP and then SUDDENLY you discover ANOTHER DOOR and you rejoice
because YOU’RE SAVED! HURRAH!!! but as you go through and the BOTTOM COLLAPSES and
you realize that IT IS YET ANOTHER LEVEL OF DESPAIR and you keep FALLING and
FALLING and TUMBLING and OH LORD WHEN WILL IT END and…Well. You get the idea. That is where I have been.

In case you can’t tell, it has been super fun. Like just damn near delightful.

Anyway. I am back now. Like, not back back – I’m currently being
sixteen levels of digested – but I am no
longer free-falling further and further into the three-hundredth-and-twenty-seventh
layer of hell. What’s that, you thought there were only nine? Well I’ve got news
for you, my friend; Dante is a sad ass liar. Nine layers of hell, huh. I wish there was only nine. I’d sell my
soul for only nine.*

But Girl With Words, I
hear you say in your non-existent voices, however
did you escape layers three-hundred-and-twenty-seven through to
three-hundred-and-three? Are you magic? What saved you?

Maybe I will be able to do so in future, but as of today, I
am not fixed.

What I am is a work in progress.

And that is okay.

Now. Please do not get me wrong. While it is true that
nothing saved me, that doesn’t mean nothing helped
me. Or that no one helped me. People helped me, you guys. People help. Not
all people suck. Most people suck. But
not all people suck. Who even knew,
right?

Firstly, I have a wonderful treatment team. Like for real.
Wonderful. I have had many, many treatment teams in my lifetime and I can
honestly say the people who work with me right now are hands down the best, she claimed, and more; a battle-scarred conquistadorrrrrr….ahem. Excuse me.***

Secondly, although it is tied for firstly, I have an
incredible family. A legitimately amazing family like the ones you read about
in storybooks and epic works of fiction and you wish families like that existed
and then it hits you that they are real
and you have one. And you need
to take a moment to doubly triply quadrupley check that you’re not mistaken
because damn, how is this even real? But
they are real. And they are yours. And they love you, even when you wish they
didn’t.

Thirdly, I have fabulous, kind, patient, and loving friends.
Friends who have repeatedly resolutely refused [try saying that three times
fast] to ditch me even after I gave them approximately eight hundred reasons
to. Per week. I will never understand why people like, love, or care about me,
but I will be endlessly grateful that they do.

Finally, although there is nothing final about this because
it matters every single day, through
the combined efforts of the above three groups of my favourite humans, as well
as some hard situations and a lot of working on yuck things and crying and
giving up and crying and giving up and trying again and wearing my hair across
my face like a patented Hair Shield Of Invisibility™ and also crying and did I
mention the crying? No? Well, there were tears. Like Alice in Wonderland level
tears:

…as well as all that and
about a gazillion other things, I am officially at the point where I am 5000% D O N E with the bullshit inside my brain and am BEYOND ready
to beat it right out of my head with a baseball bat.

Sometimes, no grand moment or event or person or band gives
you the thing you need to hold on or renew the fight against your Neurons Of
Mass Depression™.

But sometimes, no thing saves you. Singular.
Sometimes it is so many things – so many wonderful, kind, compassionate people,
as well as your dogs, and following your passion by returning to study to get
your second degree, and reading Harry Potter for the sixty-seventh time, and
yes, listening to your favourite bands – sometimes it is so so so many things and people and events and everything
everything everything that you cannot pinpoint the exact moment when your
voice became louder than the noise inside your head. You cannot name the final
piece that completed the puzzle. Sometimes, and I know that this is a cliché
but it is a cliché because it is so damn
true, but sometimes, nothing and no one saves you. With the help of others,
and I mean a lot of help and a lot of others, you can learn to saveyourself.